I would like to share with you an excerpt from a 10 part blog series in the Huffington Post. The author is Karen Kimsey-House, Co-founder of cti, and a dear mentor/teacher. This is Part 1 of 10. You can find the full post and future posts on Huffington Post (online).
I’ve noticed that we human beings expend an inordinate amount of time and energy protecting our hearts from shattering. The cost? We become armored and narrow and stop evolving. In fact, the only way we can evolve is when our sense of what we know and trust is destroyed. As soon as we think we’ve got it all figured out and try to keep things the same, we die. Staying static doesn’t work because everything is always evolving and changing around us. If we attempt to avoid going with the flow, we meet with resistance or begin to fold into ourselves. We’re either expanding or contracting, living in the flow in an affirming life or stuck in a diminishing life.
Fortunately, the human heart can be shattered over and over and still recover. The heart is the most amazing construct in the universe. It’s an ever-expanding, infinitely healable and resilient learning instrument. Yet we tend to protect it like it’s a fragile, shriveled thing. It needs to break — it’s the only way it grows. Experience helps too, but heartbreak has really taught me the most.
We all must make an important decision: Will our heart be shriveled and closed, or open and bruised? I remember the moment I made that decision. I was 19. I’d had my heart shattered after choosing the wrong guys. “Don’t wear your heart on your sleeve, Karen!” I’d scold myself every time. I seriously considered just closing myself down to relationships permanently. But when I looked around at the adults in my life, I saw a lot of dead faces. I realized that was the alternative to staying open — to be closed was to be dead. To be open, and thus vulnerable, was to be alive.
And so worth it.
People are afraid of heartbreak because they think pain is bigger than they are. Everybody on the other side of heartbreak will tell you how important it was to have had their heart broken, even though they did battle to avoid it. Heartbreak is a huge opening to the next phase of our development and it takes courage — what I call “rage of the heart” (coeur is “heart” in French). There is a saying about courage that I adore: “If you throw your heart over the fence, the horse will follow.”
Throw your heart out in the name of your life purpose, even when you don’t know what will happen. Sometimes it will break, and then there is growth.
Karen Kimsey-House, MFA, CPCC, MCC, is the Co-founder and CEO of The Coaches Training Institute (CTI), the oldest and largest in-person coach training school in the world, and the co-author of the best-selling Co-Active Coaching: Changing Business, Transforming Lives. Karen was one of four pioneers of the profession, and in honor of its 20th birthday this year, she is sharing her insights about human transformation in a ten-part series, Disrupt Your Life in a Good Way.
